The Metropolitan Opera opened its season with Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore—“The Elixir of Love”—which has a suitably melodramatic plot involving a lovelorn peasant who tries to attract a fancy lady by drinking an elixir that a quack doctor sells to him. The lady is not interested, agrees to marry someone else, then she later becomes intrigued when the peasant gives her the cold shoulder, everyone is at cross purposes, the drama increases as the story unfolds, and it’s all very, well, operatic. (The opera was broadcast live on multiple screens in Times Square last night, as well, drawing a large crowd.)

That kind of grand gesture never happens in real life, right? During pre-performance cocktails, we polled the attendees, and just like an opera, their romantic stories got more and more dramatic the closer it got to curtain time.

“I was about 12 years old, got my first kiss, and her parents came home, and I had to make an escape from the house,” Amar’e Stoudemire recalled, laughing. “Out the back door, hopped on my bike, and I was out of there.”

“I wrote a girlfriend a book once. I wrote her a whole book,” actor James Purefoy said. He was about 18 at the time. “I wrote it; I bound it.” Purefoy says it worked—she loved it. However, sadly, the book is not available on Amazon.com for us to read. “This was way before the days of self-publishing.”

Patrick Stewart walked by, and when VF Daily inquired about his greatest romantic overtures, he pointed at the woman by his side, girlfriend Sunny Ozell, and said, “Look in front of you.” “He gave me tickets to see him in Macbeth,” the lady said. “That’s a hell of a first date.” She says she wasn’t instantly won over, but afterward they went for a glass of wine, and she found Stewart to be a “perfectly lovely human being.”

Courtney Love guffawed when we put the question to her. “Grand gestures? Darling, I’m the queen of them,” she said. She once hopped on a private plane to go to see someone in a hotel, and then got right back on the plane. “Because I’m not that rich,” Love explained. “You know, when you get a private plane, you have to pay for both ways, so you get 12 hours.” She has also given someone a tree, and, coincidentally, somebody recently gave her one too, a willow.